Thread: Useful SSH commands for running your own cPanel VPS/Server

After years of managing not only my server but numerous others as well, I've learned quite a few nice SSH commands that can save loads of time.

First

Code:

tar -cvvf name.tar files

This command will create a compressed folder named "name.tar" of all the files/folders you list (replace files with things like "public_html")

Code:

tar -xvf name.tar

This will extract the tar you made in the previous step

Code:

scp user@ip.add.res.ss:/directory

SCP will make moving files between servers a breeze. This command usually saves loads of time from downloading files from FTP, then reuploading.

Code:

service cpanel restart

Restart cPanel and a load of other services that cPanel depends on

Code:

service httpd restart

Restart the apache web server

Code:

service mysql restart

Restarts mysql server

(You can replace the "restart" with either stop or start depending if the service is running or if you need to start/stop it.

That about wraps up most the common ones I use, of course there are a load of others as well such as wget, yum and more but we'll save those for a later post.

I think you may be mixed up on the tar commands, I work from FreeBSD so perhaps you have a different version of tar

Code:

tar -cvvf name.tar files

This will just create a container for the "files" and they will be the same size as before, but with the benefits of being one file, name.tar

To create a compressed archive

Code:

tar -zcvvf name.tgz files

The extension is debatable - tar.gz but .tgz is shorter

To extract the compressed archive

Code:

tar -zxf name.tgz

Note, some file formats are not worth compressing using the above methods, typical examples include media files such as video and music. From my experience they tend to grow in size by a few mb.

Code:

[root@sites /tmp/test]# fetch "http://www.wordlistgenerator.net/results.aspx?regular=1&regularish=1&irregular=1&select=randomly"
results.aspx?regular=1&regularish=1&irregular=100% of  865 kB 4104 kBps
[root@sites /tmp/test]# mv results.aspx\?regular\=1\&regularish\=1\&irregular\=1\&select\=randomly test.file
[root@sites /tmp/test]# du -h test.file
896K    test.file
[root@sites /tmp/test]# tar -cf test.tar test.file
[root@sites /tmp/test]# du -h test.tar
896K    test.tar
[root@sites /tmp/test]# tar -zcf test.tgz test.file
[root@sites /tmp/test]# du -h test.tgz
 44K    test.tgz